A wireless sensor network, for example, a wireless sensor network based on mesh topology, requires low power routing technology.
The lower power routing technology denotes technology that can be applicable to various types of application services such as monitoring of buildings and bridges, environment surveillance, harvest management, physical distribution processing, and the like.
The wireless sensor network for providing the application services generally uses an ad hoc network based on mesh topology.
Each node constituting the wireless sensor network includes a sensor module, a control module, and a communication module. Each node transmits information collected via the sensor module to a destination node using a multi-hop scheme.
Since each node constituting the wireless sensor network generally uses a battery as power, a routing operation and the like may highly require low power characteristics.
Generally, in the wireless sensor network, the low power routing scheme includes a synchronous duty-cycle scheme and an asynchronous duty-cycle scheme. The synchronous duty-cycle scheme and the asynchronous duty-cycle scheme are configured as a function that is mostly performed in a Media Access Control (MAC) layer.
In the synchronous duty-cycle scheme, each node performs time synchronization for the entire network using a synchronization packet to transmit and receive data in an active period, and is changed to a power saving mode in a sleep period in order to reduce power consumption.
In the asynchronous duty-cycle scheme, each node transmits a wake-up packet to neighboring nodes in order to transmit data. After informing about information associated with data transmission, when a node receiving the wake-up packet is changed to a reception mode, each node transmits data.
In the wireless sensor network, low power routing schemes may have a problem that an end-to-end latency time increases. Also, a collision in the network may deteriorate the entire system performance.